Top Concerns 2004/05 

Iain Stinson

UCISA Executive Committee member/The University of Liverpool

For the second consecutive year UCISA has carried out a survey of its membership to determine those IT issues that are of most concern. Members were asked to suggest issues of concern and these together with other input were reviewed by the Executive and a list of candidate top concerns produced. Members were invited to vote on these and we had a good number of member institutions registered their votes.

Members were asked to select no more than five issues from the candidate list in each of the following categories:

• Those IT related issues that are most important for your institution to resolve for its strategic success.
• Those IT related issues below are likely to become much more significant within the next twelve months.
• Those issues below as leaders in the provision of IT at your institution are you spending most of your time addressing.
• Those IT related issues on which your institution spending the most resource (human resource and or financial resources.

(The voting was changed this year to a scheme that is based on the equivalent EDUCAUSE survey.)

The issues coming out as those most important to the strategic success of our members’ institutions were:

Rank
1	Network Security
1	Strategic Approach to Infrastructure
3	Systems resilience and availability
4	Anytime, anywhere computing
5	Learning support
6	Ensuring sufficient funding
7	IT Institution's planning
8	Business Continuity
9	Enterprise Portals

Those that we expect to become much more significant in the next twelve months are:

Rank
1	Anytime, anywhere computing
2	Extended hours
3	Enterprise Portals
4	Services Management Formal Approach
5	User Management
6	Document Management
7	Systems resilience and availability
8	Network technologies
9	Data Management

We asked the Heads of IT Services which issues were consuming most of their time.

Rank
1	Strategic Approach to Infrastructure
1	IT Institution's planning
1	Staffing
4	Network Security
5	Ensuring sufficient funding
6	Determining priorities
7	New Staffing Structures
8	User Management
8	Departmental Relationships
10	Customer Centric Service

Members were also asked to rank the issues by the level of resource addressing them was consuming.

Rank
1	Systems resilience and availability
2	Network Security
3	Network technologies
3	Learning support
5	Data Management
6	Data interfaces
7	User Management
8	Anytime, anywhere computing
9	Strategic Approach to Infrastructure
10	Enterprise Portals

We analysed the results across all of the ways we asked our members to vote and a group of eleven issues were found to be highly ranked.

Rank
1	Anytime, anywhere computing
2	Systems resilience and availability
3	Network Security
4	Strategic Approach to Infrastructure
5	Learning Support
6	Network Technologies
7	Enterprise Portals
8	User Management
9	Ensuring sufficient funding
10	Data Management
11	IT in Institution's Planning

What are these issues about?

This section provides a short summary of the six issues which were ranked of highest concern overall. The bullet points set out what we mean by each of the Concerns.

Anytime, anywhere computing

• Infrastructure issues:
• Network connectivity, network sign-in, network authentication, and accounting;
• Network security; balance between security and convenience/ease of access;
• Resource management in a peripatetic environment;
• Enabling technologies for secure use and access.
• Application issues:
• remote desktop eg file store access, document management;
• office productivity tools eg CRM, MSOffice (or indeed Open Office);
• mobile device synchronisation eg phones, PDAs, laptops;
• mail system;
• portal channel access eg phone, PDAs and other small display devices;
• Off-site access to corporate information and business applications;
• Governance issues for remote use of corporate information and systems; development of institutional policies;

• Security; policies for using institutional applications and data on systems not owned by the institution; risks to institutional data held on such machines;
• Institution's rights to access/control such systems when connected to its network.

Systems resilience and availability

• Conflict between service provision and the application of updates and other maintenance activities;
• Business requirements for continuous availability of services (24x365);
• Timing of maintenance activities: when is out of hours?
• Technologies for resilience: Layer 4 network switches and routing, system clustering for resilience, storage infrastructures, SANs; Data backup.

Network Security

• Hacking, SPAM, computer viruses;
• Firewalls, intrusion detection;
• Identification of security breaches;
• Authentication for use of data network; 802.11x and other mechanisms;
• Potential conflicts between open network access (to provide wide access to facilities) and security of access;
• VPNs.

Strategic approach the IT infrastructure

• Development and implementation of a policy/strategic direction for IT infrastructure;
• Determining the scope of an enterprise/institutional IT infrastructure policy;
• Obtaining buy-in for the institutional IT infrastructure policy;
• Selection, deployment and maintenance of an enterprise wide IT infrastructure;
• Role of proprietary and open source elements in the IT infrastructure;
• Change control for an evolving IT infrastructure

Learning support applications

• VLE development and integration with other applications for supporting learning (such as e-Portfolios, Personal Development Programme support tools, e-assessment, plagiarism detection);
• Linking VLE to corporate information; use of VLE systems with mobile computing devices.
• Exchange of student information: Alignment for standards for the exchange of information about students within the H and FE community and with other educational bodies;
• Ongoing costs of VLE/MLE systems

Network technologies

• Wireless;
• The wireless media: 801.11a, 801.11b, 801.11g;
• Coverage;
• Open /closed access;
• Role;
• Wireless vs wired;
• Optical networking;
• Standards and equipment;
• Quality of maintenance and support;
• Dark fibre ownership, leased dark fibre, service provision;
• Public wireless vs wired vs 3rd generation;
• Remote access from other networks;
• VPN.

Enterprise portals, web based services

• Justifying their need, determining benefits;
• Business strategies and web portal issues;
• Management issues, ownership;
• Standards and implementation issues;
• Robustness.

User management

• Identification, authentication, authorisation of users;
• Intra-organisation and inter-organisation user management issues;
• Short term users, visitors etc;
• Authorisation for use of remote resources;
• User Directories: Managing user identities through e-directories and meta directories; maintenance of multiple directories, synchronisation of directory contents;
• Single sign-on:Systems to enable users to make use of one set of credentials to access a number of different resources; users may only be challenged for credentials for the first system they access – once identification is established other systems allow access based on the authentication established.

Ensuring sufficient funding of IT

• Ensuring continued institutional, strategic investment in IT and systems;
• Ensuring resourcing levels (funding levels) are sufficient to properly support the portfolio of services and the levels of service require by the institution;
• Ensuring sustainable, strategic investment in High Performance Computing, e-Research and other additional technologies services;
• Being asked to do with the same or with reduced levels of resource;
• Avoiding risks to IT services (eg unreliability, poor performance) and to ITS personnel (eg having to try to do more than is reasonable, excessive levels of work related stress) from inadequate funding;
• Cost of software licences and maintenance.

Data management

• Storage and handling of increasingly large volumes of data; storage technologies (including reliable storage (RAID, mirroring), SANs, virtualisation, fibre channels, SCSI over IP); backup systems.
• Data curation – provision of access to data in the future (cope with technology changes).

Ensuring that IT is being full considered in the development and planning of our institutions.

• Changing role of ITS within the institution;
• Involvement of ITS/consideration of IT issues in development of institutional plans and developments;
• Institutional recognition and acceptance of the importance of IT in formulation of all policy issues.
• Engagement of ITS with institution at an appropriate level to ensure appropriate policy input is received from and by ITS.
• Ensuring strategic investments are made in IT to sustain the service required by the institution.

What next

Members have indicated that they find the survey of value both in reviewing how their concerns match the concerns of the UCISA community and for reviewing their institution’s IT strategy.

UCISA will be pursing these issues in developing its programmes for meetings and in liaison with external agencies (such as the JISC) and those who provide products and services to the UCISA community.

The full results of the survey can be downloaded here:

•  Top Concerns 2004/05: full results of the survey

Acknowledgements

Thanks to members of the UCISA Community and Executive for their input to this process and to Jake Gannon and Duncan Brown (University of Liverpool) for providing the on-line voting system. Thanks also to Apple UK for donating two iPods that were awarded to voters (selected at random).